


Still A Nightmare

by softcorevulcan



Series: A part of the world [7]
Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Cuddling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Nightmares, Slice of Life, mentions of Illyria once being an Eldritch-horror, past Lilah/Wesley mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 12:30:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17622422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softcorevulcan/pseuds/softcorevulcan
Summary: Illyria wakes Wesley, trying to initiate something. They talk about the nightmares they had during the night - dreams about what's gone.Takes place in the same timeline as "Being in This World."





	Still A Nightmare

**Author's Note:**

> I really like the idea of exploring what Illyria might be going through, as she tries to get used to this world and her new life. That's sort of the driving reason for the series.

In Oregon, in Faith’s current safe house and base of operations, Illyria can hear the other novice slayers starting to stir upstairs. The hour is early, just past dawn. The sun rays coming in weakly through the curtains of the living room, like ghosts. She is on the couch, curled in toward the inside, and Wesley is in her arms.

She woke up at the first upsetting noise - a loud aggressive electrical beeping, in the distance - and stayed stock still until the noise was silenced by a ruffled bang, followed by a groan distinctly belonging to the slayer Faith. 

The slayer’s room is on the first floor, near enough to Illyria’s ears, and she can hear the woman sluggishly getting up, pulling on clothing, wandering into the kitchen to start coffee, unaware Illyria is awake as she stumbles past. The sound of drips - a coffee maker, Illyria recognizes - and the silhouette of Faith in the kitchen, just standing, waiting. Then the drips slow, finish, and there’s more light banging - not enough to wake Wesley - it is tentatively quiet. It’s just that Illyria hears better than everyone else. Except, perhaps, Angel. But he is supposed to be in the basement, sleeping, after his patrol last night. 

Faith finishes her quiet clanking, and then Illyria can hear the squeaky old door to the basement swing open, Faith’s steps pounding gently on the creaking wood as she walks down. 

Illyria lets herself tune out the sounds of stirring in the basement, the beginning footsteps of some of the young women on the floor above slowly putting themselves together. She yawns, some part of herself irritated that she does.

Wesley isn’t thrashing, or sweating, or any other kind of physical sign he might be having some bad experience in his sleep, so she curls up closer into his chest, enjoys the warmth and the slow rise and fall of his breath. She lets herself stroke her fingers up and down his arm, feeling the tenseness of his upper arms and shoulders, lets herself ponder if she wants to massage that tension away.

Instead, she just presses, pulls her arms inward and clutches onto his shirt instead, soft and rustled from sleep, warm like his body. He will wake soon.

She feels a hardness at her thigh, reaches down to touch it. 

Wesley wastes no time in returning her action with a tone she is intimately familiar with, irritating as always. “Illyria,” he says warningly, voice hoarse but obviously stirring to alertness. His body has stiffened, muscles frozen and ready to react. 

“It is morning.”

She hears a gentle sigh, and Wesley’s soft eyes open - not glaring, not now, not yet, he hasn’t worked up the energy - and pass over her delicately so that they go straight to the window and the wisps of weak sunlight leaking in.

She wonders if he’s not ready yet, if his mind fell onto Fred.

After a comfortable moment, where Illyria’s still touching him - because she’s wet, she woke up that way, and he seems aroused, and she’d like him to engage her - she hears that annoying tone again. “Illyria, stop. I mean it.” 

She doesn’t, of course, but then she feels the first hints of his arms about to move to pull her hand away - or push himself apart - and so she pauses herself, waits for him to relax again, tentative. Then she finally makes herself let go, bringing her hands back to her sides. 

He seems content enough with that. 

“Fine,” she says, quietly, mulling over a million things in her mind. 

After a minute, she reaches out to his shoulders, decides to rub the tension out of them anyway. It’s more moments she gets to spend, feeling warm, pretending she’s accepted - before the human panics, or has some other conflicting emotional response, and looks on some verge of tears, and irrationally makes her want to pity him enough to move away. 

She doesn’t know when she started caring what he thinks of her. When she started feeling a pit in her stomach, a sudden empty weight when he rejects her attention. 

Wesley says, connection feels good not necessarily because it’s done a certain way, but because you care about the person you do it with. And because you care, all of it is wonderful, is good, is worthwhile and special. He says that’s why it doesn’t matter too much if she’s good at it - whatever it is humans think arousing is - because if she cares about the person, if they care about her, it will be nice anyway.

Illyria knows, whether she wants to acknowledge it or not, that she cares. About all of these people. That she wants them to stay alive, no matter what she says aloud. 

She’s like Wesley in that way - for all the violence she threatens, at the end of the day, all it is are tantrums, frustration. It’s not really for them. It’s for life, for this horrible thing that Wesley says is not fair and never will be. That he says, all anyone can do, is try their best to make fairer, make it better for those people you do care about, and hope to have the strength to keep pushing through when it doesn’t - when nothing makes it better.

Wesley’s eyes have drifted back to her, meeting hers finally, and they’re still soft from sleep, hazy, not yet coherent enough to remember how much he likes to despise her. Maybe - maybe he doesn’t, doesn’t despise her, but - he has to pretend he does. He isn’t strong enough to stop lying to himself, to admit he cares too. At least, not to admit it all of the time. 

There are moments he’ll admit it. But as much as he claims to dislike lies, he’s more comfortable in the ones he makes for himself in his own head. It’s only him that occasionally pulls the strength to ignore them. And join the real world, again - is what Angel would say.

“You were - are aroused, I -”

“Sometimes men just wake up that way. It doesn’t mean anything in particular.”

“How - what a useless function.”

“Mmm,” Wesley agrees, tiredly, before finally dropping his eyes to some place a little to the side of Illyria’s head, instead of at her. The truth must have caught up to him. 

“I like bdsm better,” she says, “then you can say stop all you want, and I don’t have to unless you use the safe word.”

 

“Mmm,” he hums again, maybe agreement, but not to acquiesce to her, of course. Still, he lets her stew in her frustration, stretches out his arms and holds her back, for a moment. “You know, generally, you shouldn’t touch people without their permission. If they’re sleeping.”

“I know that. But you’re different.”

Wesley’s warm hands are soothing strokes along her back. “I knew it was a mistake, starting this with you.” He releases a breath, not quite heavy. “I told you, we were doing it in a - in a less than healthy manner last time.” He lets out a tired sigh, lets himself lean into the couch behind him - and Illyria lets herself fall forward, leaning against him. “Last time I consented, of course. But in the future you should - we both should - really ask first, instead of jumping right - right into it,” he finishes weakly, quietly. His mind is drifting somewhere else, just like his gaze.

“You didn’t ask for permission, beforehand, with that woman,” Illyria remarks, plainly, and eventually Wesley pulls his eyes back to her face, to seeing her. 

She’s won, she already knows. “Well - true. But… nothing I really did with her… was healthy.” Illyria lets herself lean her head down into the pillow they’re sharing, watching Wesley, waiting to see if he has anything more to say. “It was… I never really asked for her consent, she never really… asked for mine. But to be fair, we were both… both using each other, both probably abusing… that was, the point really. It just so happened she really liked everything I did to her, wholeheartedly. And at the time, well, I thought ‘what the hell.’ I went into it knowing it was wrong… its just how it was with us. We liked - it was like a game, playing each other, pushing. It’s just… who we were. It doesn’t mean it was right. Nothing -”

“Nothing about it was right,” Illyria echoes, remembering him saying it before, the last time she’d asked about him and Lilah. 

He hums quietly, agreeing. 

“We enjoy pushing each other. I don’t see why we would have to be more careful.”

Illyria stares, watching Wesley, hoping he understands she is genuinely trying not to push him right now. She’s just trying to understand - to make him more clearly define what he thinks their expectations are supposed to be. 

He laughs, a little hoarse because his throat is still dry from sleep. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be healthier about it, Illyria.” He giggles again, a little, and Illyria feels one of his hands gently stroke through her hair. 

It feels nice. She can remember the ghost sensation - like a mirage underwater - of Charles Gunn running his fingers roughly through Winifred Burkle’s hair, looking at her with a warmth that made this body heat up, soothed. Wesley - Wesley is too tired and preoccupied to look at her with such intensity, right this instant. But she feels a prickling warmth in her chest, nonetheless. 

“I suppose.”

Wesley keeps stroking through her hair, occasionally ghosting the skin of her neck, and Illyria wants to press herself into his chest, just rest there until this warmth in her chest spreads to her whole body and makes it become some kind of equilibrium. Instead, she opens her mouth to speak again. “I woke up aroused. I wanted to be touched.” 

He gives another quiet laugh, the rising of his chest jostling her, just slightly. It’s comforting. 

“You did not have nightmares, tonight,” she comments, giving him a way to reject her without making them continue on that topic of conversation. 

Too much arguing and his good mood will no doubt vanish. Then they will both be unpleasant when the rest of the house eventually rises and starts chipping away at their moods much more incessantly. Illyria has no pity for Faith, but Illyria does hope she isn’t as exhausting for the people who train her, as Faith’s acolytes seem to be on the slayer.

Wesley’s laughs, barely there anyway, die off. His hand trails down to her back, not stroking anymore. But he’s not mad - not at her, anyway. 

“Oh, it was still a nightmare.”

“Oh,” Illyria returns, “you weren’t restless in the night.”

“Yes, that was good. I don’t feel quite as exhausted as I could be.” His eyes are starting to shift again, to a far off place, but at least this time they drift to her neck, not entirely avoidant. It isn’t about her then - or about  _ that _ . 

“What did you dream about?”

Wesley’s head makes a sound as his neck seems to release, the cranium’s weight increasing on the pillow. He probably couldn’t hear it, but she can. She stares at his eyes, tries to pull images from his brain as if it were possible with her will alone. It’s not.

She may well be completely human, one day.

It’s always getting worse… this losing of herself.

He lets her move her arms to hold him back, stroke across his back over his rumpled shirt.

“It didn’t start off like one. A nightmare.” The sun is slowly getting brighter outside. Someone will have to close the curtains eventually, if Angel ends up being woken up, tries coming upstairs. She is absently monitoring the noises of the house. Right now, in the basement, there is a sharpening of a blade - probably Faith - but no other noise. “I was walking in the park - it was sunny out, I had Connor in my arms. It was - back when he was a baby. He used to like me so much.”

Illyria notices, humans have trouble breathing, this barely there hitch and stop they seem to do, when they are emotionally duressed. Illyria at first considered it a weakness - another contradiction of the human design, lowering their body’s efficiency for no discernible reason. But the more she tries… coexisting, getting used to the kind of navigation of relationships she will doubtless find more common the longer she exists in this form… she finds their tells, their weaknesses, help her interpret their intent better. Where she used to offend on accident, she now can tell when she says something harsh when they weren’t actually meaning to attack. She’s getting a better idea of the meanings between the words humans say. And oh, there’s always so much there. It’s a shock that she finds herself wanting to understand at all.

There is so much, they don’t speak aloud. Because they are afraid to give it form. She understands. 

The longer she resides here, the more she realizes how much that fear keeps her from voicing her own concerns. It is one thing to know her world is empty and dead, her people extinct. It is altogether another to give it sound, to be hit with the harshness of it, and be forced to acknowledge it. 

“I walked up to Cordelia, and Connor made little noises at her. Cordelia was smiling, chattering on like she - like she used to. Angel walked up, smiling at us too, like the way he did back when he used to cook us breakfast, or remind us to get some rest. He was saying something, but then he disappeared - like people do in dreams, I suppose. I must’ve realized it didn’t make sense, him being in the sun like that.”

“Then all of a sudden, I was back at the hotel. Connor was still in my arms, but Cordelia was gone. It didn’t matter, of course, because those things don’t matter in dreams. But when I came in, Fred and Gunn seemed odd. Off. They opened up the fridge, next to where Angel was drinking, and started drinking their own cups of blood.”

Illyria tried to imagine it. What it might mean to Wesley, the people he loved turning into vampires. How that was different from Angel being one. Souls meant more to the people here, than they did to her. But then, she didn’t know if whatever she was now even had a soul. If there was even an equivalent concept - a soul - back in the life she came from. Everything just was, then. It was never something she had thought to consider.

“I tried to leave, then. When I got to the door, I couldn’t get out, like there was a barrier there, in the doorway, invisible. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t -”

Illyria nods, at least as much as she can, with her head against the pillow. Still, Wesley seems to appreciate the attempt to empathize with him. 

“I suppose - the worst part was just, seeing everyone alive. But everything still being wrong.” 

Wesley’s hand has drifted back into her hair, stroking soothingly again, and Illyria wonders if he’s lying to himself again. If he’s pretending, a secret only he’s aware of in his own mind, that she’s Fred and she’s alright, and that the nightmare was all it was - a nightmare. 

The human would never admit to such a thing. But humans lie. All the time. To others. To themselves.

“Sometimes dreams are parts of the day and thoughts you’ve had, smashed together. I imagine a lot of it was just, things I’ve thought about, putting themselves together in new and creative ways.” 

“I see.” 

Wesley seems to notice that he’s holding her, almost cradling her, and his hands slow - but don’t quite freeze. He probably doesn’t want to be caught stopping himself. So now he is pretending he’d meant to touch her, soothe her, from the start.

“What - what did you dream about?”

She wonders if he cares, or if he is trying to be polite, like he asks her to try to be. “I dreamt about my old life.”

He is silent, and they can both hear the teenagers upstairs now, stomping around more loudly, clumsy, crossing each others paths and starting off each other on bad moods. It’s only a matter of time until they come downstairs and upset the rest of the guests in the household. She feels Wesley use the hand not in her hair to readjust his pants from where Illyria had shifted them, touched him. 

Once he’s settled again, his lips move. “Fascinating... the identity as an individual you currently have, contemplating the one you -” he stops himself. He knows Illyria doesn’t like dwelling on what is no longer. 

It hurts. The way thinking of the past hurts Wesley, too.

“I was in my stronghold. Within, there were humans - uncountable bodies, lined up within one of the large halls, their bodies pressed together, spilling out of the doors - all in front of me. You were there.”

“Interesting.”

“You ripped their hearts out, with your hand - which you could not do, were it not a dream. One by one, until you had gotten through them all. Their blood covered the floor, spilled onto each other, dripped from you.”

“I was sure, I must have ordered it. I knew those humans were unworthy. They were - perhaps worshipers - I did not want them. I was satisfied to see them eliminated.”

She does not tell him, how in her dream she ordered her soldiers to drag the bodies - not to consume them - and to burn them outside. She does not mention that in her dream, she reaches out to Wesley with her many arms and engulfs him, smearing the blood away until she is touching his bare skin, caressing it. That she presses inside him, and around him, and does not say he is worthy - but feels it, knows it, and its intoxicating and uncomfortable all at once - because it is a dream, and in dreams the world becomes strange and alive in a way it used to be once upon a time for her, but no longer is, not in this new body, not getting weaker and losing her power everyday -

“You were the only human who remained. The other bodies were gone. You stared at me, even though no human should have looked at me. The other humans had - before you killed them. You looked at me and told me to kill you.”

Wesley’s breath does not hitch or freeze, instead he lets out a small, sharp, airy laugh. Illyria cannot decipher the meaning of it, of the feeling it stems from. Humans are contradictory.

“I reached out for you,” she does not say that she had already been holding him, possessing him. “I do not know if I was meant to rip out your heart then, as is the nature of a dream. But when I touched you, my arms became heavy, numb, until I couldn’t feel them.”

And suddenly she had only two arms in her dreams, instead of many. She had shrunk - or perhaps Wesley had grown - until they’d been the same size in stature, none superior to the other. She had clung on, desperate, as if holding on tight enough would bring her back to the moment before - to her tentacles clung around him, taking him, connected and safe and  _ her _ . “Eventually, I was in - this body. I was no longer who I used to be.”

He nods, mirroring the attempt at connection she’d tried to give him a few minutes before.

“I do not know if I was going to kill you. That was where it ended, when I awoke.” 

“I see.” 

Illyria wonders, without any sense of urgency, if Wesley is purposely mimicking her. 

His hands are more active again, and this time, finally, Illyria is fairly sure Wesley completely means to be touching  _ her _ . Trying to sooth her. That this is real, and not some fantasy.

“It must be hard for you. Getting used to this,” he’s barely voicing himself, perhaps he doesn’t want to speak loudly enough to leak out some tone. In case it’s unintentionally harsh, or gentle.

“They are all gone. That is what made it a nightmare.” She doesn’t want to say it out loud. But Wesley says, sometimes, saying the things that hurt us, make those wounds heal easier in the long run. 

The way he’s holding her, it doesn’t feel so awful, saying it. Not when she’s like this. All she can see, the soft cadence of his gaze on hers, the clumsy wrinkles of the clothes on his chest, his arms. The blanket upon them, wrinkled as well, shielding them from the brunt of the light. 

They both hear the loud thumps of someone coming down the stairs, then another trailing right behind, and another. The slayers in training. 

Wesley does not stop holding her, soothing her, letting them remain safe and apart in their moments of wake, for a little longer.

As the girls trail past them, into the kitchen, all yanking open cabinets and clanking dishes and food containers, Wesley pushes himself up to sit, and Illyria rises with him. 

 


End file.
